We have only known about Lyme disease since 1975, but now the discovery of an amber-encased 15-million-year-old tick has revealed that the bacteria that causes the disease has been around much, much longer than the human race. The discovery was made by George Poinar, Jr. from Oregon State University, and the findings were published in Historical Biology .

For many front end developers, JavaScript was their first taste of a scripting and/or interpretive language. To these developers, the concept and implications of loosely typed variables may be second nature. However, the explosive growth in the demand for modern web applications has resulted in a growing number of back-end developers that have had to dip their feet into the pool of client-side technologies. Many of these developers are coming from a background in strongly typed languages, such as C# or Java, and are unfamiliar with both the freedom and the potential pitfalls involved in working with loosely typed variables.

The game had been due for release a couple of weeks earlier but the development team was behind. 12 months behind. Half-Life 2 was going to be late, and Newell had yet to admit how late. Such a leak was not only financially threatening but deeply embarrassing.

In these various battles, the utilities often claim that solar customers aren’t paying their fair share of costs. But an increase in residential solar not only reduces the amount of electricity coming from polluting sources like coal-fired power plants, it provides a clear value to the utilities that’s often left out when they argue for additional fees. Solar generates during peak hours, when a utility has to provide electricity to more people than at other times during the day and energy costs are at their highest. And solar panels actually feed excess energy back to the grid, helping to alleviate the pressure during peak demand. In addition, because less electricity is being transmitted to customers through transmission lines, it saves utilities on the wear and tear to the lines and cost of replacing them with new ones.

It looks natural and in keeping with the design and functionality of iOS as it stands today, and looking at "iOS Block" for the first time you might be forgiven for thinking it’s a leaked feature from iOS 8. The concept works by expanding your fingers on an existing app icon to get a Block with information like weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and music controls. You can then pinch it back to a normal icon, or place it permanently alongside other icons on the home screen. Machalani has created three sizes: iPhone, iPad in portrait, and iPad in landscape orientation. You can have multiple Blocks on a home screen, and the iPad versions leverage the additional space on a tablet display.

One of the Internet Archive's fastest growing collections is its TV News Archive. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, HD feeds from more than 65 news channels, both foreign and domestic, are recorded on the Internet Archive servers. The US feeds are fully searchable the following day. Roger Macdonald, who runs the project's entire Television Archive, preaches treating all media as data. He says many TV and cable networks are "scared about experimenting" with closed captioning data that could make their content searchable by a global audience. By making its videos text-searchable, "our service has vaulted over the confines of the linear video storytelling," he says. For example, when Harvard and MIT researchers studied how the media covered the Trayvon Martin shooting, they turned to the TV News Archive, using its closed captioning data to help map the story's evolution.

The only other property with a similar approach is The Washington Post , which hired star privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani to work on the NSA leaks hand-in-hand with reporter Barton Gellman, the other early recipient of the Snowden treasure trove of documents, along with Greenwald and Poitras. Soltani's byline has graced many NSA scoops, while he's helped other reporters with their own technical stories.

Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.
(Filmed at TEDxMidAtlantic.)

"I was in early morning traffic when an inattentive driver hit me from behind and I was thrown from my motorcycle." Ryan Shearman, founder and CEO of FUSAR Technologies, tells me at Augmented World Expo 2014. It's the kind of thing that could happen to any motorcyclist -- and indeed, happens too often -- but it also served as a spark of inspiration. "It started the wheels turning in my head: how can I make motorcycle riding safer?" His answer was to build a better helmet .

It’s large scale infrastructure, to the tune of €300 million according to Telefónica. It’s easy to forget the internet is a big, weighty business, and that’s a problem, Arnall says. “We tend to be quite unreflective about this stuff, how it works and what it implies, because we can’t see it and it often ‘just works’,” he says. “It’s very difficult to pay attention to and critique stuff that is invisible or hidden behind many layers of abstraction. Data centers are incredibly important yet invisible places, they demand more critical reflection and attention.”

At the conference, WIRED sat down with Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab and one of the event’s planners, to discuss this phenomenon of convergence, where bits from the digital realm are fusing with atoms here in the physical world (see gallery above). Experimentation is spreading, he says, and it won’t stop at gadgets. For Ito, the next great engineering platform will be living matter itself.

Mercedes-Benz and Fast Company invite business owners to submit a 60-second video for the chance to win a new Sprinter van and $10,000 toward vehicle customization. Click here for official rules.
Check out last year's winner: 6D Helmets Share this with your friends on Facebook or Tweet this page to your followers.

The researchers hooked study participants to a cap containing dozens of electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes, sat them down in a flight simulator, and told them to steer the plane through the sim using their thoughts alone. The cap read the electrical signals from their brains and an algorithm then translated those signals into computer commands.

It's not quite clear when we started using the word "porn" to describe all things visually appealing. But here we are, and if you can't beat them, join them with a massive ranking of porn types, I guess? Here they are in order of greatness.

Bigelow said the fake Bolton had taken two months to build up trust before sending her the link to the website he asked her to review. When she finally got around to doing it, the intrusions started soon after. “During that night in the middle of the night, there were two attempts from the United States to break into my professional Gmail account. They had the chutzpah to send me a test email from an outlook.com address. I woke up that morning and Google had sent me a note that said someone from Tehran has tried to break into your account,” she said. She then changed her passwords and ended all contact with the Iranian Bolton and then alerted the office of the real one.

The Inspector General, who conducted the study with the help of a team of experts in international postal banking as well as a former executive from Merrill Lynch, correctly frames the proposal not as a challenge to mega-banks, but as a way to deliver needed amenities to the nearly 68 million Americans — over one-quarter of U.S. households — who have limited or no access to financial services. Instead of banks, these mostly low-income individuals use check-cashing stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, and other unscrupulous financial services providers who gouged their customers to the tune of $89 billion in interest and fees in 2012, according to the IG report. Post offices could deliver the same services at a 90 percent discount, saving the average underserved household over $2,000 a year and still providing the USPS with $8.9 billion in new annual profits, significantly improving its troubled balance sheet. The report calls simple financial services “the single best new opportunity for the posts to earn additional revenue.”

In making the announcement, however, department officials were at pains to make it clear the LAPD doesn't intend to use the new hardware to keep watch from above over an unsuspecting public. If they're used at all, the remotely controlled aircraft will be called on only for "narrow and prescribed uses" that will be made clear to the public, the statement said.

As part of a zoo enrichment program at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington D.C., otters are given a choice to either play music on a keyboard or sit back and enjoy the show. The program aims to engage the sight, hearing, and touch of the otters while giving attendees a pretty neat show.

They don’t code. They’re not designers. And they definitely don’t walk around in hoodies. But these six tech founders are changing the face of the $54 billion apparel e-commerce market. Their multi-million dollar companies are reinventing retail with new brands and platforms that are altering our appetite for shopping — and where and how we buy.

is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 34 million unique visitors worldwide and 15 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

This website uses cookies. By continuing to browse this website without changing your web-browser cookie settings, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more by reading our cookie guideline .

One key element of the new Dragon that Elon Musk highlighted was its reusability. Since the spacecraft can land with accuracy rather than needing to be splashed down in the ocean, Musk noted that this mean a Dragon spacecraft could theoretically be refueled and be ready to get back into space in a very short period of time. This dovetails with SpaceX’s efforts to build a resuable first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. The company estimates that being able to reuse the rocket saves tens of millions in flight costs.

We’ve known for a while now that Google is testing a new favoriting service called Google Stars, aimed at helping users save, share, and organize Web content. This is largely due to multiple leaks, detailing features as well as showing off the interface in a video and screenshots . Today, Google+ user Florian Kiersch , who has done the majority of the digging behind the service, has leaked the Google Stars extension for Google Chrome.

The Browse tool will filter out a randomly selected type of content through Facebook's Graph Search, whether it's videos that you've liked or people in your networks you haven't friended yet. For those using Facebook to kill time (and aren't we all using Facebook to kill time?), it's an excellent method of procrastination.

Now that he doesn’t need to protect his company’s tennis tactics, or stay mum during a high-profile investigation, High is speaking freely about courtsiding. His colleague Richard Coughlan is also talking, and a former courtsider for another company has written a book on the topic to be published this week. All three describe careers that parallel those of the players. Courtsiders travel the world alongside the tennis tours, spend hours of each day honing their craft, seek to make it to the highest-profile matches to earn a big payday and, if they’re booted early in the week by their opponents, kick back and enjoy touring glamorous cities.

Dear Lifehacker, What is the deal with lithium-ion batteries (the kind found in smartphones and laptops)? I've heard lots of different things about how to take care of them, like that they need to be kept charged between 40% and 80%, or that they should be drained completely and charged to 100%. What is the ideal approach to maintaining a good battery-life-to-battery-health ratio?

Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley, who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley’s electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative, and now the DARPA money, has created a “feeding frenzy” around new technology. “It’s a great time to do tech for the brain,” he says.

IGN has reached out to Warner Bros. regarding the allegedly leaked poster, asking if the print was real and whether an official announcement for the next Mortal Kombat game is incoming. Warner Bros. did not respond before the publication of this story.

These days, when your Green Day song is over, the next track begins playing within seconds. We weren't so lucky in the days of Napster. Many songs would come with what we called "bonus silence" -- two to five minutes of white noise added to the end of an otherwise normal track. Sure, it was a problem that could easily be solved with a re-download, but who had time for that?

The social network is emailing users old photos of themselves in hopes of enticing them to return to Myspace. The emails include one or two old photos and a line that reads, "The good, the rad and the what were you thinking..." along with a link that takes users to their profile.

is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 34 million unique visitors worldwide and 15 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

We are sorry to announce that Springpad will be shutting down on June 25th. At that point, Springpad.com will no longer be available and all online and sync features of the mobile apps will stop working. Read more about this announcement .

In a traditional computer, annealing works like this: You mathematically translate your problem into a landscape of peaks and valleys. The goal is to try to find the lowest valley, which represents the optimized state of the system. In this metaphor, the computer rolls a rock around the problem-­scape until it settles into the lowest-possible valley, and that’s your answer. But a conventional computer often gets stuck in a valley that isn’t really lowest at all. The algorithm can’t see over the edge of the nearest mountain to know if there’s an even lower vale. A quantum annealer, Rose and Ladizinsky realized, could perform tricks that avoid this limitation. They could take a chip full of qubits and tune each one to a higher or lower energy state, turning the chip into a representation of the rocky landscape. But thanks to superposition and entanglement between the qubits, the chip could computationally tunnel through the landscape. It would be far less likely to get stuck in a valley that wasn’t the lowest, and it would find an answer far more quickly.

That story is "The Fault in Our Stars." It's a funny and unsentimental book about two teenagers who meet in a cancer support group and fall in love. The book became a sensation, as Pogue's panel of hard-core Green fans made clear.

The company will kick off the event with its highly anticipated, two-hour keynote at 10 a.m. PT on Monday. CNET will bring you all the news, photos, and commentary from the event. We'll start things off with a live show with Brian Tong and Donald Bell, as well as Ashley Esqueda and Rich Demuro, hosts of CNET's new show, Tomorrow Daily. You can figure out what time the keynote will start in your timezone here.

What kind of sorcery are we talking about? With varying degrees of difficulty, your used veggies can grow new life. The timeline varies from a couple of weeks to three years, but you can have fresh, regrown produce that only requires tap water and soil.

From the Privacy Shortcuts menu, click the link for "Who can see my Stuff?" Under the setting for "Who can see my future posts?" click the button and select the appropriate default audience for your updates. You can select Public (usually not the best choice), Friends (probably the best option), or Only Me (not much point putting it on Facebook then). You can also choose a custom option if you want to share your updates only with specific lists of Facebook friends.

Ford wasn’t worried about things like the aluminum doors or hood (something that’s been used on past models), but it had to be damn sure the cargo box on one of the world’s hardest-working trucks could take the abuse meted out by contractors and construction workers, ranchers and roughnecks. So in late 2011, its R&D team bolted aluminum cargo boxes to half a dozen 2011 F-150s and sent them to three of Ford’s best industrial customers. It provided the trucks for free, explained that it was testing new materials and new methods, and asked the clients to treat them like they would any other truck.

One spring day in 1894, Thomas Edison unveiled a remarkable moving picture machine called the Kinetoscope in a Manhattan parlor. Some 500 people lined up to drop quarters into what was the Oculus Rift of its day—a look into something truly transformative.

Halt and Catch Fire quickly establishes a compelling dynamic between the two lead characters: Joe MacMillan, a fast-talking sales guy played by Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies) who comes up with the idea to reverse engineer his former employer’s PC, and Gordon Clark, an engineer Scoot McNairy (Argo, 12 Years a Slave) who believes in his own greatness but is held back by alcohol and the demands of his family.

Staley has been an AIDS and gay rights activist for decades. In 1989, he cofounded the Treatment Action Group (TAG), which lobbied for improved AIDS research. In 1994, Bill Clinton appointed him to the National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development. He's also one of the main subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary, How to Survive a Plague , which focused on AIDS activism groups, like TAG.

is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 34 million unique visitors worldwide and 15 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.

Interestingly the divorce papers of 1999 indicate that his mother represented him as a special needs child with high functioning autism, to which his father replied “I didn’t know that”. It was agreed that there would be further evaluation. It is clear that there were concerns about his mental health from an early age. While anger played a part, the root matter will be is what caused the anger to escalate to this degree. A psychiatrist reviewing the writings of the killer (on CNN) said that it was clear after review this young man had a “broken brain” – probably neuro-chemical or maybe even physical problem.

Police found an automatic weapon on Nemmouche at the time of his arrest, but it's unclear whether it is the same one used in the shooting at the Brussels-based museum. The gun was discovered wrapped in a white sheet, which had the name of an extremist group fighting in Syria (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) written on it. Police also found clothes in Nemmouche's bag, which resembled what the gunman wore during the shooting, as well as a digital camera containing footage related to attack, CNN reported .